Category: Books

Modern life is stressful, face it, and many of us fantasize doing something quite different to earn a living than what we are stuck with. Wouldn’t it be fabulous to quite my job and...

      Modern life is stressful, face it, and many of us fantasize doing something quite different to earn a living than what we are stuck with. Wouldn’t it be fabulous to quite my job...

Life is not always fair. If you travel in developing countries what we used to call the Third World it s hard not to wonder about the unequal divisions of our planet s wealth,...

Camelot is forever, a myth that transcends centuries of storytelling, from Sir Thomas Malory’s 14th century classic, Le Morte d’Arthur, on through the ages, passed down to us in modern times in music and...

As a writer of mystery novels, I occasionally attend book conferences, events with names like “Bouchercon” and “Left Coast Crime” where big authors such as Sue Grafton and Elmore Leonard hold forth to auditoriums...

What’s the greatest novel ever written? This is a subjective matter, clearly: one man’s Proust is another’s Dostoevski, and the rest of the world can go to Dickens for all we care. For my...

Being a mystery writer – and someone who occasionally teaches mystery writing to wannabe authors – it’s usually a let down for me when I pick up a crime novel, too much like work....

The critically-acclaimed young Brooklyn writer, Jonathan Lethem, has come up with some fairly original notions for novels. In As She Climbed Across the Table, for instance, a woman physicist falls in love with an...

Victorian England makes a fine study of hypocrisy, a veritable Petri dish of civilized manners that are greatly at odds with the reality lurking underneath. I like to imagine proper British tea parties, London...

Vampires can get awfully lonely, lurking in misty graveyards century after century. It’s not easy to be immortal, I suppose, watching empires rise and generations of man go, wondering what it all means. Frankly,...